Why did Post kill Jose Vargas story?

Rarely does a story hit with the impact of former Washington Post reporter Jose Antonio Vargas’s revelation in the New York Times magazine Wednesday that he is an undocumented immigrant.

Within minutes of it appearing on the Times’ website, it burned across Twitter like wildfire, pushed along each time with passionate endorsements from influential journalists. Meanwhile, ABC News blasted excerpts from its exclusive interview with Vargas, which will air on “World News” and “Nightline” tomorrow and “Good Morning America” on Friday.

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The Post, the paper that hired Vargas as an intern, put him on a team that won a Pulitzer and was the intended home for Vargas’s revelation, could have been at the center of all the buzz. But last week, for reasons that no one at the paper is owning up to, it got cold feet.

“Jose did come to us with the idea for this piece,” said Carlos Lozada, editor of the Post’s Outlook section. “I worked on it with him for a few weeks, with the intention of running it in Outlook. Ultimately the decision was made here not to move forward on it.”

He declined to discuss the “internal deliberations” that led to that decision, as did executive editor Marcus Brauchli.

“We made a judgment not to run the piece,” said Kris Coratti, the Post’s spokeswoman. “We think it is a really interesting first person account and we’re glad he found a place to share his story.”

The article could be problematic for the Post, because it not only reveals that the paper broke the law by employing an illegal immigrant, but that Vargas told a mentor, Post assistant managing editor Peter Perl, about his immigration status. It is not clear whether Perl told anyone else at the paper.

But it’s unlikely that the Post killed the story to keep this fact from coming to light, since Post editors knew that the story was the opening salvo of a media campaign Vargas is helping to launch that will press for a different conversation about illegal immigration - and that the story was likely to find a home somewhere else.

The campaign, now officially known as Define American, began taking shape in March, and by April, Vargas and his cohorts had hired Hiltzik Strategies – strategic communications advisors to stars like Glenn Beck and Katie Couric – to handle their media.

Matthew Hiltzik, founder of Hiltzik Strategies, said they knew there were problems at the Post when the publication date kept getting pushed back.

“I had serious concerns that it kept being postponed,” he said. “That raised a red flag for me.”

Finally, last week, the Post spiked the piece. Vargas then reached out to two contacts he had at the New York Times magazine: Peter Baker, his former colleague from his days at the Post, and Chris Suellentrop, a magazine editor who had tried to get Vargas to write for the magazine in the past.

“Jose was a friend and a colleague when we were at the Post, but I never knew the story about him,” Baker said. “And he called to let me know about it, and to let me know that he was going to be revealing this and that the Post was not going to run it. I said, well, of course I’d be happy to see if the Times would be interested. It was obviously such a compelling story that, not surprisingly, the Times magazine guys looked at it and said, we definitely want to run this. This is what journalism is all about, putting a face on issues that are important in society.”

Suellentrop blogged about getting a mysterious email from Vargas late last Monday night, and described how the magazine’s editors began considering the possibility of “tearing up the book” for Vargas’s piece before they had even read it.

“We obviously think it is a provocative, well-written piece of journalism,” the magazine’s editor, Hugo Lindgren told the Huffington Post’s Michael Calderone. “So we were delighted to have it fall in our laps.”

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CORRECTION: Corrected by: Burgess Everett @ 06/23/2011 12:15 AM
CORRECTION: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that New York Times magazine editors agreed to run Vargas's story without having read it. They only began considering the possibility of rearranging the issue before they had read it.